The Benefits of Marketing Automation & Social Media Integration [Free Cheat Sheet]

Are you utilising your social media channels to the best of your ability? Having tens of thousands of followers on social media is great – but it won’t do anything for your business unless you have a clear plan about how you will communicate with those followers with a view to achieving your marketing goals.

Social media and marketing automation platforms are a match made in heaven. Using social media channels can be a very effective part of your overall marketing strategy, but it can also be very time-consuming. Additionally, KPIs and ROI can be difficult to track if you’re doing everything manually – especially if you’re active on several social media accounts.

Integrating your marketing automation platform with your social media accounts offers several benefits including:

When you push content from your email to social channels, you are giving your followers an opportunity to either share your message or provide it to those who sit outside your segment.

Social is your new word-of-mouth channel. It has proven to be incredibly powerful for today’s businesses – over 80% of consumer buying decisions are influenced by recommendations and posts from friends and family on social media.

Social media also enables you to communicate with your customers and followers more easily on a one-to-one basis. This helps to build brand loyalty and customer satisfaction and enables you to deal with any complaints in a transparent and efficient manner.

By integrating social media ads into your automated marketing processes, you can reach customers and groups of customers in a more precise and efficient way.

Integrating your marketing automation platform with your social media channels allows your team to collect a 360-degree view of your prospects.

Social networks collect a vast amount of information about their users including demographics, interests and preferences, and browsing habits and behaviour. Marketing on social media channels gives you access to this valuable data.

The more information you have about your followers, the more you can refine your marketing strategy and develop laser-targeted campaigns that have a better chance of success.

Understanding how your viewers are interacting with your social posts also makes it easier to segment your audience – you can instantly see which of your followers are most engaged with your brand and the type of content they want to see more of. Having this deeper understanding of your audience allows you to serve them better.

When your marketing automation platform is connected to social media you’ll also have full control over all this data in order to run reports and analytics to see what’s working and what isn’t.

Email campaigns can be an effective form of online marketing but if your users are spending most of their time on social media platforms, you won’t reach them with email alone.

When you send an automated message through a marketing automation platform, you also have the option to release it via social channels. This helps to make your marketing processes more efficient and enables you to coordinate content across different channels.

Let’s say you’re launching an event. Rather than just sending an email to let your followers know about it, you can use your marketing automation platform to release content and coordinate responses across several different social media channels:

• Your event email can be linked to a landing page and social channels (and this landing page can be automatically personalised depending on social profiles)
• You can create a unique marketing hashtag for followers to use across social media channels
• You can post reminders and related content about the event on social media
• People interested in attending the event can register their interest via social media
• Attendees of the event can be encouraged to share photographs and content from the event on their social accounts
• You can send a personalised thank you email and/or message on social media after the event

One of the most basic benefits of marketing automation shouldn’t be overlooked – the fact that it makes juggling several different social media accounts so much easier and can reduce a full-time job down to just a few hours a week.

Writing posts for social media and posting them in real-time can be incredibly time-consuming, not to mention the time spent interacting with your audience. Automation platforms can greatly reduce this time by allowing you to queue up content and drip-feed it over several weeks or months.

Integrating everything into one dashboard also allows you to manage all customer communication in one place and enables different members of your team to use your social media accounts – no more constantly logging into and out of different platforms.

Have you considered the benefits of marketing automation and social media integration for your business? Is your business currently using email as part of your marketing strategy?

Marketing automation is a powerful tool when used to its full advantage. We hope that you now understand how you can use its marketing automation’s powerful potential to level up your marketing in your business.  For more information on using marketing automation, check out our complete guide to marketing automation best practices.

Swift Digital’s templates help you effortlessly create stunning emails and events communications using our drag-and-drop email and event builder.

You can raise engagement with embedded images, videos, polls, article feedback, and emojis and schedule messages to send at the right time.

Government departments’ unique marketing requirements are covered with Swift Digital, and full compliance with all anti-spam and privacy laws is guaranteed. Swift Digital is also ISO 27001 certified.

Swift Digital is Australia’s leader in marketing automation software and event management working with organisations like the NSW Government, ATO, and companies like Westpac Bank and Qantas.

Find out why we’re the Australian government department’s number one choice for their professional communications and events.

To find out how your business can get the best out of Swift Digital’s platform, contact our team today.

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